


Antitheses

by UnscriptedCryptid



Series: Broken Bones and Team Bonding [1]
Category: DC Cinematic Universe, Justice League (2017)
Genre: (Like there aren't any organs or anything but that boy is going to bleed), Angst with a Happy Ending, Barry Has A Bad Time, Barry Whump, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, semi-graphic torture, slight psychological trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-04
Updated: 2017-12-04
Packaged: 2019-02-10 14:20:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12913710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UnscriptedCryptid/pseuds/UnscriptedCryptid
Summary: The Justice League has an enemy with a particularly nasty ability. Barry Allen pays the price.OrBarry gets tricked, tortured, and thoroughly traumatized.But he does not give up hope.





	Antitheses

**Author's Note:**

> This is entirely self-indulgent and I apologize immensely.  
> Fair warning: this is quite a bit darker (and a lot more disjointed/less heavily edited) than my other fic. Some bones will be broken and some blood will be shed. But somebody had to make the obligatory torture!fic and, let's face it, that person was always going to be me.

It starts like this: he wakes up from a nap that he does not remember taking, and he finds that he is in a decrepit little room that he has never seen before.

It’s almost funny—in that sympathetic sort of way, like when you watch a dog get caught in a narrow doorway because it’s carrying a wide stick in its mouth—because this is not a situation that is entirely foreign to Barry Allen.

He’s been squatting since he was 17 years old. Decrepit rooms are _kind of_ his thing, in the way that ostentatious wealth is Bruce’s or weird idioms from the South are Clark’s. It’s not uncommon for Barry to just pack up and move whenever he feels that people are getting too close to discovering him, or when he gets bored and has nothing better to do than scope out a new place to crash, or even when he just feels like moving on an impulse—because change can be good. It can be fun. (Plus, he hoards snacks like it’s the end of the world. If he stays somewhere too long, the cockroaches will accumulate. And he hates bugs.)

And it’s even _less_ uncommon for Barry to forget that he has moved and to come out of a midday power nap confused and halfway alarmed with his new surroundings. So, yeah. Waking up suddenly in a place that he does not recognize could very well be business as usual.

Could be, Barry thinks, if not for the shackles on his wrists that pin him to where he is slumped against the wall.

It takes Barry a moment begin questioning what’s going on. He’s got that post-nap feeling—the groggy bewilderment of having just been asleep, the muted regret of currently being awake, a slight headache from having slept in a likely uncomfortable if not nearly impossible configuration—and it’s making logical thought seem like something far too elusive and abstract for him to accomplish. But with a lot of perseverance (and the growing panic that comes with the knowledge that there are _shackles on his wrists_ ), Barry is able to piece together some details about the situation he’s in.

The room is cold and dark and damp, and it is lined in some sort of jagged grey plaster that makes it look like a cave. Not a _cool_ cave like Bruce’s either. Like an actual, literal cave, where someone would expect to find salamanders and spiders crawling all over the walls. The shackles on Barry’s wrists are made of some sort of durable metal, and they are held together by a thick rod that makes it impossible for him to pull his hands apart. The shackles are attached, in turn, to a length of chain about three feet long that is linked to a pike in the plaster that doesn’t budge when Barry gives it a few experimental tugs. All in all, a pretty solid attempt at keeping him in place.

“Glad to see you’re awake, Mister Allen,” a voice cuts in then. “I hope the facilities are to your standards.”

 _And oh._ _Oh God_ , Barry thinks, flinching back violently enough to make the chains rattle as he brings his hands up to his chest.

(Later, Barry will realize that this marks the point where everything begins to go downhill.)

\---

So maybe it starts like this: there’s a lady in the room, and upon a second glance, Barry realizes that he knows her.

“Mrs. Moredano?” he asks. Or tries to ask. His tongue can’t quite keep up with the words, so the name comes out soft and slurred.

It’s coming back to him, now. The work function the night before. The arduous process of picking out a suit. The many failed attempts to tie his own tie before Bruce was forced to intervene lest Barry somehow injure himself.

The party itself: just as awkward and boring and terrible as Barry was dreading it would be, until Mrs. Moredano—head of her department, somebody powerful that could help him win his father’s case—pulled Barry to the side, congratulated him on his work, handed him a glass of champagne that he had politely and clumsily declined until she gave him a _look_ that rivaled the one Clark gave him the first time they met.

Then…nothing. He can’t remember a single thing after that.

“Not quite,” Mrs. Moredano says, and Barry watches as her face morphs—young, sharp features turning rounder and softer until she looks like the friendly old baker that Barry sees at the grocery store every Saturday. Then, the features shift again, skin rippling and molding until he’s staring right into his own eyes. And it’s a pity, because this would be one of the coolest things that Barry has ever seen if he weren’t so scared. 

“I was worried for a minute, Mister Allen,” he hears himself say (and does his voice actually sound like that? Wow. This day somehow got worse.) “I knew you had a fast metabolism, but the details were a bit of a mystery to me. I thought I’d killed you with that extra dose of Rohypnol. Glad to see I was wrong.”

“You roofied me?” Barry asks, and it’s still croaked, but it’s a lot better than before.

“Seven times the lethal dose.” The not-him grins, and Barry swallows down his unease as he takes in the sharp canines and pronounced cheekbones.

He never thought his smile was ugly before.

“You’re truly a miraculous specimen, Mister Allen. But what else should I expect from Central City’s very own Flash?”

Barry shakes his head, tries to ignore the way that it feels like his brain is bouncing around his skull. “I don’t know who you think I am, but you’ve got it all wrong.” Then, after a second of consideration: “And nice mirroring act, but my teeth aren’t that… _perfect_. Not that I spend too long looking at my own face, but. Uh. I’ve been living off of soda and energy bars for like eight years.”

“Ah. It’s always something,” the not-him says, changing back into Mrs. Moredano with a bored hum. “But don’t even bother trying to hide your secret around me, Mister Allen. I know about you. I know _everything_ about you.”

Barry frowns, bewildered and unsettled to his very core. Shrugs. Bruce will know how to deal with that delightful piece of information later. “Well, uh, that’s nice. Thanks? Always glad to, uh, meet a fan. But if we’re through with the pretenses, then—”

He tries to match the frequency of the cuffs so that he can phase himself free, reaching out to the Speed Force and matching up the vibrations before jerking his arms apart with a sudden ferocity. But the cuffs catch against his wrists, and in the end, all he gets for his efforts is a sudden jolt of stark, burning pain that makes him cry out and curl into himself.

“What was—how—” he stammers between ragged breaths. Mrs. Moredano laughs.

“I know about your neat little tricks, too. Those cuffs were a special gift—from a friend, Mister Allen. You’re not going to be able to phase out of them, and they’ll punish you if you try. But I’m guessing you just figured that out yourself, didn’t you?”

Barry swallows back the nausea as the skin on his wrists blisters and peels, his blood dripping to the ground from where the cuffs bit in the deepest. When he focuses hard enough, he can see now that the frequencies of the metal keep changing, rapidly jumping from one to another in a way that he’s not even sure the Speed Force will allow him to follow. He wishes she could have said this before.

“Yeah,” he squeaks. Lets out a small sound of complaint. “Oh, man. That would have been so cool if it had worked. Can we pretend none of that just happened?”

Mrs. Moredano laughs again, sound bright and terrible.

“You’re a fun one, Mister Allen, I’ll give you that.”

And it’s not fair, because Barry would have killed for anyone in his high school to say those exact same words to him. Now, they just make him feel apprehensive, like he’s a toy that some kid is about to play with until they get bored and abandon it out on the playground or something. He shifts his weight until he’s leaning back as comfortably as possible (not at all) and tries to will away the fear growing in his stomach.

“Not to be, uh, rude—but if you already know everything, then why am I here?”

“That’s an easy one, isn’t it, Mister Allen?”

Mrs. Moredano reaches out to grab Barry’s face, pulls at it until he’s forced to look at her eye-to-eye even as he whines out his protest. Then, the fear in his stomach gives way to raw terror gives way to stony weightlessness as she shifts one last time, and he can’t look he can’t look he can’t—

“You’re the weak link, Barry,” his mother says. Her nails cut into his skin as she roughly squeezes his jaw. “You’re going to tell me everything I need to know about your team, or I am going to break you.”

\---

Okay, so it starts like this: Barry jerks awake as he’s hit with a wave of cold water, then immediately lets out a shout of agony as the shackles heat up around his abused wrists.  

As far as rude awakenings go, this is surprisingly not the worse that Barry has ever endured. Once, when he was living alone in some other decrepit little building before he had gained his powers, Barry decided to try whiskey for the first time, hoping in part that it would help him fight off the cold of winter and in part that it would help him figure out why people seem to like alcohol so much. He woke up the next morning shirtless in a broken bathtub somewhere halfway across the city, threw up three times, and spent the better part of the day feeling like he went ten rounds with a dumpster truck and lost. 

Granted, that memory doesn’t make waking up to frigid water all over his body that much better, but it puts it in perspective, at the very least.

(At least this time he didn’t lose his fourth-favorite T-shirt. He never did figure out where it went. One of the mysteries of his life that will forever remain unsolved.)

“Good morning, Barry,” a voice chirps, vowels round and bright. When Barry is done rubbing what water he can out of his eyes, he recoils at the sight of the little girl peering down on him.

“Nope,” he says. “Nuh-uh. This is too much like _The Shining_ for me _._ This is nightmare fuel. Wake me up when you’re like thirty years older.”

He shuts his eyes then, squeezes them tight until the shrill laughter of a child morphs into something huskier and vaguely familiar. He’s surprised that his complaining actually _worked_ for once—for a villain, no less, (take note, Arthur)—but when he opens his eyes to find his father looking back at him, the surprise quickly turns into cold resignation.

“Right,” Barry says. His head flops back against the wall. “I don’t know what I was expecting.”  

“Come on, Barry,” Henry Allen says, “aren’t you happy to see your old man out of the Big House?”

And Barry could spend an entire afternoon listing all of the Bad Things that he would rather have happening to him at this very moment: having his head dunked in a toilet by Arthur. Having Victor pull up every internet search that Barry has ever made. Having Bruce roast him again for owning three identical jackets without a single suit in sight. Having—

But Barry’s head snaps to the side as Henry’s hand makes contact with it, and Barry freezes, stomach in his throat, as he takes note of what the shapeshifter has messed up this time.

(His dad doesn’t wear a ring, he thinks. This Henry is wearing a ring. The real one doesn’t.)

“What do you want from me, again?” Barry asks, working his jaw to try and distract himself from the sting.

“You’re going to tell me everything,” Henry replies, words clipped.

“Oh,” Barry starts. “Well. Uh. My favorite color is blue, but it’s easier to find red scrap, hence the suit.” He sits up as straight as he can, shaking his head to try and flip the wet hair out of his eyes. “And, uh, okay. I’ve eaten ten pizzas in one sitting before. Would have been twelve, but Aquaman took two of them because he likes to bully me. I can’t tell if it’s tough love or soft hate. I’m leaning towards soft hate.”

Henry’s face lifts into a surprised expression that is entirely too familiar. Barry would say he doesn’t like it, but that feels too much of an oversimplification. There isn’t a word negative enough to describe how he feels about this.  

“You’ve always been a smartass, haven’t you?” Henry asks. Barry shuts his eyes, swallows back the emotion that it elicits somewhere in his chest.

“I’m going to miss work,” Barry responds. “You’re going to get me fired.”

But Henry just smiles, eyes shining—and it isn’t real, it isn’t real, it isn’t—“I’m going to do so much more than that. We have a lot of catching up to do, Bare.”

And Barry wants to make some sort of comment—maybe a passing joke about how most dads would start with a game of catch, or a pseudo-brave remark about how his absence from work is not going to go unnoticed (because it pays off, sometimes, to be loud and obnoxious and hard to ignore.)

But before he can say anything, Henry winds back his fist and drives his knuckles right into Barry’s eyebrow.

\---

It starts like this: Barry wakes up with a groan, body bruised and aching and stiff despite the amount of healing that the Speed Force has done. The last thing he remembers is his father laughing as Barry struggled to breathe through the hands at his throat, as his efforts to claw at them were thwarted by the clunky shackles that burned through his skin with each movement.

And Barry can work through this. He’ll figure out the shackle’s pattern eventually, he thinks, or the League will find him first. But it’s so hard, trying to hold out when every wrong move promises something more painful than the last. And Barry isn’t cut out for torture—is very rapidly learning that it should have been among his lists of worries long before now—but there isn’t much he can do besides hold strong and wait for some opportunity to escape. He isn’t going to let his team down. He isn’t going to say a word.

Well. He’ll say many words. But none of them will be useful.

(Maybe he’ll get so annoying that the shapeshifter will just let him go. Arthur would have a field day with that.)

Regardless, it starts like this: Barry opens his eyes, and he feels the impulse to shut them immediately, because his father is standing there again, looking down at Barry with his arms crossed and a frown on his face.

“You shouldn’t sleep in so late,” the not-Henry chastises his not-son. “Not when you have so much work to do. You want to get your father out of prison, don’t you?”

Barry chews on his lip, adjusts himself until he’s sitting cross-legged with his back to the wall.

“Have you given up on pretending to be the real deal already?” Barry asks. “I thought that was your whole thing. Your shtick, or whatever villains call it. Is it shtick? I can’t tell if that’s an actual word or something from a cartoon. It sounds like—like some sort of German curse word or something. _Shtick._ ”

The thing wearing his father’s face doesn’t respond, just leans down so that he is at Barry’s level as Barry continues to ramble.

“Or do you use something more professional, like M.O.? That’s what we call it for serial killers at my job. Their _modus operandi._ It’d be a pretty cool phrase if it weren’t being used in reference to murder, but whatever. Can’t win them a-”

The punch to the stomach is not unexpected, but it still makes Barry fold over himself and dry heave, ribs groaning in protest with each hacked off cough.

“Yup,” Barry mumbles, grimacing in disgust as saliva pools at his teeth. “Yeah, I suppose that’s fair.”

“We’re going to try this again,” Henry says, grabbing Barry by the juncture between his neck and shoulder and wrenching it backwards until Barry’s forced to look at him. “Who is the Batman?”

“Uhhh. Man in a bat suit. Fights crime. Sometimes tells me to stop being stupid,” Barry blurts out, stomach still heaving from the mixture of pain and apprehension. “Tall, rather brooding superhero with an affinity for darkness. You’ve probably seen him in the news.”

Henry scowls. Runs a hand over his face.

“I was hoping we could work this through like adults,” he says. “I was hoping you were more mature than this.”

And Barry kind of wants to laugh—maybe a little bit—because that’s the complaint that _everyone_ has about him. That isn’t anything special.

But then there’s a knife buried down to the hilt in Barry’s thigh, and all he can do is scream.

\---

It starts like this: Barry’s father keeps coming back, and he refuses to let Barry sleep.

It’s not actually his father, Barry knows. But when Barry asks the shapeshifter any question at all— _what’s your name, why do you hate us, is my voice actually that bad—_ they respond in violent and unfavorable ways, so Barry’s found that it’s simpler to just call them whatever face they go by. Granted, this is probably going to open an entire can of psychological worms that Barry isn’t entirely sure he wants to deal with, but hey. It’s working for the time being, so he isn’t going to question it.

> (Earlier, his father talked about his mother some. Told Barry that it’s his fault she’s dead. Told Barry that he could have helped her.
> 
>  But Barry was nine. He was only nine. He couldn’t—
> 
> It isn’t real. Barry just has to keep reminding himself of that.)

But Barry’s father keeps coming back, and he refuses to let Barry sleep. 

> “You’re running yourself into the ground,” Henry says. There’s a ring on his finger. Barry knows it shouldn’t be there.
> 
> “Why do you hate us?” Barry asks again. Always the same question. Never the same answer. “What did we do? I’m not—I’m not like a _hero_ -hero the way the rest of the team is, really, but I—I can try to help you.”
> 
> Henry kneels down in front of him. Backhands him roughly across the face. Barry lets out a yelp and reminds himself why questions are a bad idea.
> 
> “Your team,” Henry says. “Tell me about them.”
> 
> Barry just shakes his head, tries to stop the ringing in his ears. “You can’t keep doing this forever.” Then, because he doesn’t know when to stop: “They’re going to find me.”
> 
> Henry laughs. Barry had never hated his father’s laugh before, and he refuses to start now, but the sound makes the panic in Barry’s chest flare as he recalls hands on his throat, knife in his leg, lacerations and bruises and burns that aren’t healing as fast as they should be.
> 
> “You’re so stubborn,” Henry murmurs, and he looks so genuinely fond that it makes Barry’s pulse sky-rocket. “Just like your mother.”
> 
> And, okay, maybe this is worse than Barry originally thought. Because, the thing is, Barry’s had a lot of stuff thrown his way these last twenty-odd years. He’s a lanky kid with a big mouth—that tends to draw some negative attention.
> 
> But not once, _ever_ , has something somebody said to him made him want to fall apart so fast.
> 
> “Don’t do that,” Barry commands, voice shaking. He grits his teeth, tries to ignore the trembling in his shoulders. “You aren’t allowed to do that.”
> 
> Henry just rolls back his own shoulders in response, picks up the knife that had been discarded by his side. It’s still crusted over with Barry’s blood, which Barry can’t help but think is unsanitary, even through his terror and distress.
> 
> “And you’re just as naïve,” Henry murmurs. He places the tip of the knife at Barry’s hip, lightly drags it across Barry’s skin until it’s poised at his clavicle. “She thought someone would come to save _her,_ too.”
> 
> Then, the knife is skin deep, is plunged further and further until Barry can feel it scraping past his collarbone, can feel is snapping through cartilage and collagen as he bucks and writhes and shouts.
> 
> “Here’s the thing, Kid,” Henry growls in Barry’s ear, and Barry can also feel the moment the knife punctures through the other side of his body—can feel the blood pouring down both sides of his unbuttoned dress shirt (the one he borrowed from Bruce), drenching the white fabric in bright red.
> 
> (And this isn’t going to be salvageable, he thinks. Those stains are never going to come out.)
> 
> “Nobody is coming for you,” Henry says. He pulls back, but he leaves the knife in place. “Why would _anybody_ ever come for you?”
> 
> Barry tries to respond. All he can manage is a hissed out wheeze. (It hurts. It hurts. It hurts.)

Barry’s father keeps coming back, and he refuses to let Barry sleep.

He cannot, however, stop Barry from passing out.

(It’s the small victories that count.)

\---

It starts like this: the shapeshifter keeps Henry Allen’s face, and any pretenses that they could ever be reasoned with are abandoned in favor of a ruthless, brutal style of interrogation that Barry has mixed feelings about.

On the one hand, it’s a great relief to see the shapeshifter storm in with no preamble and with the dogged determination to make Barry bleed, because Barry doesn’t have to spend time trying to sort between what he needs to be afraid of and what he doesn’t anymore. There is no more nervous anticipation.  

On the other hand, Barry has a tiny, breakable body, and he is now afraid All of the Time.

Sometimes, Henry Allen will walk in and beat Barry unconscious with his fists alone, snarling questions about the Justice League that Barry straight up avoids or dances around with the practiced ease of somebody who has faked their way through most of their life.

Other times, Henry Allen will break out the knife—a new knife, because he has so graciously left the other one in Barry’s shoulder as a reminder of What Not To Say—and he will spend hours carving bloody artwork into Barry’s body, making Barry scream until his voice gives out and all he can supply are helpless sobs.

One time, Henry even brings out a bowl of tomato soup—tells Barry that he knows all about his low blood sugar, and that pesky propensity that he has for passing out because of it—and when Barry hesitates to take a sip (because drugging someone with Rohypnol really does damper their faith in you, you know), Henry holds Barry’s face in the bowl until Barry gags on it, struggling to breathe through the liquid in his nose and mouth and lungs.

“Next time,” Henry warns, “I won’t be so kind.”

And Barry’s not exactly sure how that treatment was kind at all, but he’s too busy trying to get soup out of his nostrils to question it too hard.

“If you actually knew anything about me,” he tells the shapeshifter instead, “you’d know that I hate tomato soup.”

(It’s a lie. He loves tomato soup. But it’s worth it to see the shapeshifter’s face slam into puzzled outrage right up until they shatter the bowl against Barry’s skull.)

\---

It starts like this: Barry loses track of time. Barry loses a lot of blood. But Barry does not lose hope.

“I’ve given you your chances,” his father says, but there’s a ring. There’s still a ring. There is a ring, and it isn’t his father at all.

“I warned you,” his not-father says. “You can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

And Barry doesn’t know what that means, but it doesn’t matter. There is a ring. His team is coming. None of this matters.

“Sorry,” Barry says. And he _is_ , honestly, in that hollow sort of way that he’s sorry whenever he visits his actual father in prison. “I don’t know how to help you.”

“What is Wonder Woman’s weakness? Tell me.”

Barry huffs out the closest thing that he can to a laugh, but it comes out ragged and borderline hysterical with his wrecked voice. He could be a villain himself, he thinks, with that kind of laugh.

“Hugs,” Barry declares. “And ice cream.”

Henry lets out a frustrated growl, jabs the hot iron rod into Barry’s side until Barry’s wailing breaks off into soundless convulsions that make the knife embedded in his shoulder leave bloody scrapes against the wall. When the rod is pulled away again, Barry slumps onto the floor entirely, gasping for air as his father watches him with angry, glittering eyes.

“If it’s any consolation,” Barry finally wheezes, swallowing back a mouthful of bile, “your torturing techniques are impeccable. I have never been in more pain in my life.”

Barry wishes he could stop talking sometimes. But there are so many thoughts in his head—so many words that he feels like, if he doesn’t give them an outlet, they are going to build up pressure until he explodes. And then there would be Barry Allen all over the walls and someone would have to call in a cleaning crew and it would be an entire mess that nobody has time to deal with. So he just keeps going.

“You’re probably, like, the second scariest person I’ve ever been interrogated by.”

“Second?” Henry asks.

“I used to work at the Cheesecake Factory,” Barry explains. “And my manager thought I was swiping cheesecake when she wasn’t looking.” He pauses. “She was right, but still. It didn’t go well.”

“You’re ridiculous, Kid,” Henry says, in that biting sort of way that someone would say ‘you don’t have a single fucking ounce of intelligence in that weirdly big head of yours, do you?’

And as Henry brings down the hot iron rod again, piercing Barry straight through the other shoulder, Barry is inclined to agree.

\---

It starts like this: Henry Allen walks into the room, kicks Barry in the ribs, and tosses a newspaper right at his face.

Again. Not the worst awakening that Barry has ever had, but still not one that he’s particularly fond of.

“This is…?” Barry begins, struggling to read the words through the blurry vision and light-headedness. It doesn’t help that his fake father toys with a switchblade in the peripherals of Barry’s vision, flipping it open and closed with the same bored fascination with which Barry sometimes watches the nature documentaries he finds on Netflix.

“I’ve figured it out,” Henry replies, which—doesn’t answer Barry’s question at all. And the mixed confusion-frustration-exasperation must be showing on his face, because Henry rolls his eyes, opens the knife again and leans over to point it right at Barry’s chest. “It’s you.”

Barry frowns. “You’re being painfully cryptic today.”

But he follows the knife with his gaze anyway, tracks it as Henry moves it down to point at the pictures lining the newspaper article—grainy photos of Wonder Woman and Superman and Aquaman with captions including “ _Spotted in Central City”_ and _“Heroes on the Hunt._ ”

Barry winces as he looks at the date.

(It’s been ten days. He’s _so_ fired.)

“So,” he starts, clearing his throat, “you’ve taken up stalking the other members of the League? That hurts. I thought what we had was special.”

Henry holsters the knife in Barry’s upper arm. Barry wonders if he should have seen that coming through the _burning-searing-screaming_.

“Apparently the League’s been pretty desperate to find the Flash,” Henry snorts. “Turns out they _are_ looking for you.”

And Barry’s been saying that this entire time— because he’s annoying and he talks too much and he isn’t sure that the rest of the team particularly likes him, but they’re his _teammates._ Of _course_ they’d look for him—but it’s Henry’s next comment that makes Barry falter.

“You’re their weakness,” Henry says.

And it doesn’t make any sense. Barry says so out loud.

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

Because Diana has spent a century mourning the love of her life. Arthur has grown up torn between two realms, never fitting into either the way that he deserves to. Clark has lost his planet, his parents, his _life_ for a world that still argues over whether or not he should be permitted to stay. Victor lost his friends, his body, his mother, and Bruce has lost everything over and over again to keep his city safe. They’ve lost so much and they’ve stayed so strong and it’s ridiculous-preposterous-arrogant to presume that Barry Allen would mean _anything_ to them in the grand scheme of things.

But Henry shakes his head. Flips open the newspaper to a new article.  
  
_Batman Hospitalizes Two After Brutal Beat-down: Has the Bat Gone Crazy?_

“Word on the streets is that some second rate thugs thought they could intimidate the Batman into compliance by claiming that they were holding you hostage. The Batman didn’t take too kindly to that. Interesting stuff,” Henry explains. Smirks. “Tragic for Batsy’s public image, but what can you do?”

Barry swallows hard. He isn’t worth this. This can’t be about him. This doesn’t make any sense.

“You’re their weakness,” Henry Allen repeats. His smile is not kind.

“And now I’m going to make them _yours_.”

\---

It starts like this: Barry Allen never wakes up to Henry Allen anymore. He wakes up to the Justice League instead.

The first time, it’s the Batman: towering and imposing and nearly perfect, voice a flawless mixture of gritty frustration and smooth passion as he tells Barry that he deserves this—that he deserves to be alone and will always be alone and that he needs to _stop talking_.

“Wow. Spot on,” Barry interrupts. “It took you a few tries to get the Batman down, but he _does_ tell me to shut up a lot. To be fair, that’s a League-wide thing, though. I, uh. I never really stop talking. But you’ve probably realized that by now.”

“Should’ve kicked you off the League a long time ago,” the Batman growls, and that alone would probably be enough to shut Barry right up, but the Batman further ensures Barry’s silence by grabbing him by the neck and lifting him until he’s staring straight into his false-idol’s eyes.

“You’re always getting in the way,” the Batman says. Barry bites his lip, reminds himself that it’s all fake.

(He isn’t built for torture. He really, really isn’t. But he’s smart enough to know better.)

“You’re having fun _now_ ,” Barry stutters the best he can while his windpipe is actively being crushed, “but just wait until the real Batman shows up and slaps you with a lawsuit for stealing his image.”

And Barry didn’t really need to know what it feels like to be choked out by the Batman, but. Well. That’s the life he leads, isn’t it?

\---

It starts like this: the pace is brutal and ruthless and Barry feels himself slipping as time goes on.

The shifter doesn’t ask him too many questions anymore—has seemingly transitioned straight to the part of the plan where they try to break Barry as thoroughly as possible. And they’re giving it their best efforts, 5 out of 5, Barry can honestly say that he’s falling apart.

Because Aquaman holds his head underwater, laughing in that guttural, genuine way of his as Barry chokes and gasps and tries to drag in mouthfuls of air between each dunk. And Superman breaks Barry’s ribs, earnestly apologizes as Barry sobs on mouthfuls of his own blood. And tomorrow, Wonder Woman will lovingly break Barry’s fingers one-by-one, and the Cyborg will hold Barry up by clumps of sweaty hair as he makes Barry read aloud every newspaper article about his dead mother in existence. And Barry will scream and beg and plead and bleed and it won’t change a single thing.

But Barry knows what’s real and he knows what isn’t. He knows his real team deeply, _viscerally_ —knows that the corner of Bruce’s lips tweak when he is truly amused by something but doesn’t want to admit it, knows the cadence of Diana’s laughter and the mechanic rumble of Victor’s voice. He knows the lines of Arthur’s tattoos and the brown-blue of Clark’s left eye. Sometimes, it feels like the world moves in slow motion around Barry—has moved in slow emotion around him ever since the lightning struck him all those years ago—and to him, this team is _everything._

He loves them. God, he loves them.

(How could he not know them after all this time?)

But the Batman- _Bruce-_ Batman steps on the shackles between Barry’s wrists, grinds Barry’s broken hands down into the ground as Barry trembles and bows and cries. And Wonder- _Diana_ -Woman wraps her Lasso of Truth around Barry’s neck, presses his head to the cement floor with one of her boots as she pulls the rope tighter and tighter and—

Barry blacks out. Barry always blacks out.

\---

It starts—it starts—it starts—

It doesn’t end.

\---

It starts like this: the Batman runs into the cave-room, halts a few steps past the doorway, and Barry cowers off of instinct alone, crouching with his burned wrists tucked beneath him to try and hide the new burns from the Batman’s sight.

> (The last time Wonder Woman saw that Barry had tried to escape again, she had cradled his face with her hand, wiped his own blood on his cheek as she thumbed away his tears.
> 
> “Foolish boy,” she had said. Then, she had broken his kneecaps.)

“Barry,” the Batman says, and his tone is soft and rough and breathless. Barry hates it when he does this. He hates it, hates it, hates it. “Barry. You’re—you’re alive.”

Barry lets out a whimper, curls further into himself.

“Please,” Barry begs, voice wrecked, vision still shorting out on him from the previous beating. (Aquaman had left so suddenly that Barry had thought it was over. He wishes it were over.) “Please. Don’t do this. I can’t—It won’t work.”

“Barry, what are you talking about?”

Barry shuts his eyes, pushes himself as far back into the wall as he can even as it makes the lacerations on his back tear.

“Please. Please. Please.”

He hates it when they pretend to be real. He hates it when they pretend that they’re here to free him. He hates it.

(He can’t quite bring himself to hate that he still hopes.)

“Barry, it’s okay. It’s alright. It’s me.”

The Batman approaches him, crouches low and walks forward, step by step like Barry’s a cornered animal that he’s afraid to spook. But Barry has seen this before, too—knows where it’s going—and he doesn’t know how many more times his bones can break before the metahuman healing factor isn’t enough. He doesn’t know how much more he can bleed.

But he will gladly take brutal torture over _this_.

“Stop,” Barry commands, and the Batman _does,_ an arm’s length away from where Barry is huddled into a ball. The Batman goes to crouch down, but when Barry flinches, panicked, he stands up straight again, hands out in placation. And Barry hates that, too. Barry hates when he plays along. “Stop being nice. Stop pretending. Please, just,” Barry chokes on the request. He doesn’t know what he wants anymore.

There’s a clamor then, coming from somewhere outside the hallway, and Barry blanches at the implications—at the sound of other voices flooding his senses.

(It’s been a while, he thinks, since the shifter has let him go so hungry that he hallucinates.)

The Batman makes a sudden move, swings his arm out to the side in a rapid arc that makes Barry throw his own shackled arms up over himself as though they can protect him. But then he remembers the new burns—the way that Cyborg once looked upon them with a blank, disinterested expression before driving a metal rod all the way through one of Barry’s feet—and Barry scrambles to apologize, only to be cut off by the Batman’s gruff, “ _don’t move._ Wait right there.”

Barry freezes in place, sits still as his heart beats in his ears and someone snarls out a rumbled, aggravated, “what the _fuck_ , Batman? Why—”

“He’s scared. And confused. Let me handle this.”

“Why would he—”

“She’s been using our faces.”

And this is new, Barry thinks, body beginning to shake with the effort it’s taking him to remain motionless.

The hallucinations don’t usually talk to each other. Only to him.

“Barry,” the Batman says. He’s looking right at Barry now and Barry can feel his own vision getting blurry and oh God oh God he doesn’t know if he can do this. Not again.

(But he’s survived all the other times. Why not one more?)

“Barry,” the Batman says. “What do you need from me? Anything. What do you need?”

Barry doesn’t know. He really, really doesn’t know.

“I need you to be real this time,” he says anyway. “I need this to be over.”

And Batman nods. Crouches down. Frowns harder as Barry bites back a terrified sob.

"It's okay," he says. "It's okay."

The Batman reaches out, places the palm of his hand against Barry’s cheek. Then, with a careful deliberation that Barry will later realize can only be honed from years of dramatics, the Batman pulls off his cowl, and all that is left is Bruce Wayne.

\---

It starts like this:

“Bruce?” Barry asks. His voice, his body, his heart—all of it shakes. Because the shapeshifter didn’t know. They _didn’t know_. “Bruce. _Bruce._ ”  
  
“It’s me, Barry,” Bruce promises. He leans forward until his forehead rests against Barry’s own. “It’s me. This is real. Barry, _look at me_. This is real. You’re okay. We’re okay.”

And Barry’s so tired. So hungry. So, so, so hurt.

But he’s smiling when he begins to cry.

\---

It starts like this: Barry is lost. Barry is found. Nobody quite knows where to go from there.

(But they’ll figure it out.)

\---  
\---

“Bruce?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry I ruined your dress shirt.”

“…I will never understand your priorities, Kid.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you if for sticking around this long, and sorry for beating up my main boy Barry so hard. If it's any consolation, I am 100% open to following this up with copious amounts of comfort once my classes stop kicking my ass. Also I straightshotted this, so sorry if something is heinously out of place (lmaoooo).


End file.
